Jeremiah Smith set the Ohio State record for career receptions and the Ohio State record for career receiving touchdowns on Saturday in Iowa City. Same afternoon, both marks, at a place where offenses historically go to apologize. He is in his third season in Columbus.
That last part is the number that should stop you. Not the catches, not the scores. The clock.
Who did Jeremiah Smith pass for the Ohio State record?
The touchdown mark belonged to Chris Olave, and Olave took to social media to congratulate him, which is the correct and classy move from a man watching his name come off a wall. LeBron James, an Ohio kid who has never once been shy about Ohio things, reacted to the highlight too. When the most famous athlete the state has ever produced is posting about your Saturday, the moment has cleared the sport's own borders.
Understand the room Smith just walked to the front of. Ohio State receiver history runs Cris Carter to David Boston to Santonio Holmes and Ted Ginn Jr., then Michael Thomas, Terry McLaurin, Olave and Garrett Wilson in the same huddle, then Marvin Harrison Jr. That is not a position group. That is a pipeline with a waiting list. Smith is now the career leader in two of the categories that pipeline cares most about, and he got there before most players in that lineage had finished unpacking.
He arrived in 2024 as the No. 1 recruit in the country, which usually means two years of hype and one year of production. Instead he was the best receiver on a national championship team as a true freshman. The hype was the floor.
Why Kinnick Stadium made it matter more
Context is everything with receiving records, and the context here is that he did it at Iowa. Kinnick is cold math and bad weather and a defense that has spent two decades treating completions like a personal insult. It is the least generous stat environment a Big Ten receiver can walk into. Records usually fall in a 48-10 game against somebody's directional cousin in September. This one fell in Iowa City.
And Kinnick has its own thing now. Between the first and second quarter the entire stadium turns and waves at the children's hospital that overlooks the north end zone, both sidelines included. It has been going on since 2017 and it still ruins me a little every time. Whatever else happened in that building Saturday, that happened too.
What comes next for Jeremiah Smith
The records are permanent. What is not settled is how much further the gap goes, because he is a junior, and this is the season he becomes draft eligible. Every remaining Saturday is both an addition to a number nobody else at Ohio State owns and a long audition for a first round that already has his name penciled in.
The football question going forward is simpler and more interesting than the record keeping. Defensive coordinators have had two full seasons of film and a summer to decide they would rather lose to somebody else. Bracket coverage, safety help rolled over the top, a corner whose entire job description is "he does not catch it." He has seen all of it and the counting stats kept counting anyway. That is the tell on a great player: the plan to stop him is public knowledge and it does not work.
What I am watching next is the response from the rest of that Ohio State room, because the pipeline does not slow down for ceremonies, and whether Smith's yardage number comes into range of the receptions and touchdown marks he just claimed. Two walls down. There is a third one in that building.